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Smartmeme recently released a video that introduces emerging climate justice organizing and activism. The video points viewers toward the Mobilization for Climate Justice coalition web site (actforclimatejustice.org), which serves as an online hub for projects with similar concerns and goals.

The US-based Mobilization for Climate Justice coalition was formed by various organizations, which are calling on others to help build a “climate justice movement that emphasizes non-violent direct action and public education to mobilize for effective and just solutions to the climate crisis.”

Bringing together forthright principles and on-the-ground actions, the coalition organizes around three key goals. These organizers urge others to join them:

1) To build a global movement for climate justice that encourages urgent action to avoid catastrophic climate change, and which addresses the root social, ecological, political and economic causes of the climate crisis toward a total systemic transformation of our society.

2) To promote and strengthen the rights and voices of Indigenous and other affected peoples, (including workers in energy-intensive industries) in climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.

3) To expose the consequences of false and market-based climate ‘solutions’ as well as corporate domination of climate negotiations, while advancing alternatives that can provide real and just solutions and which protect biodiversity.

This climate justice organizing draws from prior environmental justice critiques and activism, as well as wider opposition towards corporations, and other international market structures. While focusing on global warming—as a consequence and a cause of injustices and market structures—climate justice organizers also are responding to other interrelated impacts of established energy systems. Here in Ontario, a climate justice group will be waging a campaign against various pollution from tar sands projects—while other climate justice organizers oppose mountaintop removal mining explosions, oil refinery pollution, biofuel land grabs, and a range of other interconnected devastation around prevailing energy systems.

Like other climate organizers, the climate justice coalition is focusing on the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15) this December. Climate justice activists will be calling on others to follow and weigh in on those negotiations—if only to question the legitimacy of the proposals or the participants.

The coalition has called a major day of action at the end of November (“N30”), but activism associated with the coalition already is underway (as you can see on their web site). Some of these related actions will be connected with the coalition more than others. Since the coalition is calling on others to take on the same concerns and strategies, it will be difficult to track where the actual coalition begins and ends. In other words, anyone who wants to join us will find many grassroots points of entry into climate justice activism.

Climate Justice Actionhttp://www.climate-justice-action.org/
is another “climate justice” coalition. They seem to be connected a lot more with countries outside of North America (whereas The Mobilization for Climate Justice is very U.S.-based).

The phrase “climate justice” also is used by various other people — some of whom probably wouldn’t know anything about Climate Justice Action or the Mobilization for Climate Justice. The concept of climate justice was around years before those coalitions were formed, so it has wider traction.

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